Chaos Under Heaven

What was Nixon’s trip to China all about?

The United States and China both had excellent reasons for wishing to establish better relations in 1972.

EDWARD SOREL

“The man is unfit to be President,” Henry Kissinger said of Richard Nixon during the 1968 Presidential campaign. Kissinger was a protégé and associate of Nelson Rockefeller, Nixon’s chief competition for the Republican nomination, and he shared Rockefeller’s opinion: that Nixon was an opportunist without vision. Kissinger was also a professor at Harvard, not a place where he was likely to rub up against a Nixon supporter. And he was a Jew. Nixon, of course, was a seething cauldron of ressentiment. He hated Harvard professors; he loathed rich East Coast establishment types like Rockefeller; he was suspicious of Jews. He despised these people because he believed that they despised him, but he could never let them alone. They were his motivation, his catnip. Less than three weeks after the election, Nixon put in a call to Kissinger, and when he was sworn into office, in January, 1969, Kissinger was sitting behind him on the platform, the new national-security adviser. Like all foreign-policy realists, Kissinger was drawn to power. For access to it, he could forgive much.

“The care and feeding of Henry was one of the greatest burdens of his presidency,” Nixon’s speechwriter Raymond Price once said, “but he was worth it.” The couple was odd in many dimensions. Kissinger was a ladies’ man (or cultivated the reputation); Nixon had trouble opening a bottle of aspirin. Neither took pleasure in sharing credit. Each hoped to use the other to promote his own renown, and each was devious and paranoid enough to find ways of preventing the other from fully succeeding. The geopolitical consequences of their co-dependency will be topics of controversy and debate forever, but one adventure has earned almost universal respect: Nixon’s trip to China, in February, 1972, which is the subject of Margaret MacMillan’s “Nixon and Mao” (Random House; $27.95).

MacMillan is a diplomatic historian. Her previous book, “Paris 1919,” was a revisionist study of the talks that produced the Versailles Treaty, at the end of the First World War. That book was subtitled “Six Months That Changed the World.” The subtitle of the new book is “The Week That Changed the World.” The phrase is Nixon’s own: he used it in his parting toast, in Shanghai. Nixon was certainly entitled to some self-admiration. He had boldly gone where no American politician had ventured since the Communist victory, in 1949; he had dealt with two dangerously unknown quantities, Mao and Chou En-lai, and come out no worse than when he went in; and he felt that he had earned a claim to the title he had long dreamed of—world statesman. Still, it’s easier to explain how Woodrow Wilson, Georges Clemenceau, and David Lloyd George (who happens to be Margaret MacMillan’s great-grandfather) gave a new shape to part of the planet than it is to elaborate on the difference that the single brief meeting between Nixon and Mao made to the world.

At the time, the visit to China was often compared to the landing on the moon, and subsequent events have not made that comparison less apt. It seemed amazing that the thing could be done at all, and especially by a career anti-Communist like Nixon, but the tangible benefits to humankind were not self-evident. The immediate objectives of the two sides—for the Americans, a peace agreement in Vietnam; for the Chinese, the return of Taiwan to the People’s Republic—were not achieved. Nixon and Mao professed to admire one another, and, in many respects, they probably did. They were both natural summiteers. They liked to hold forth on world affairs, about which, leaving the details to their deputies, they took the grand view. Mao “sees strategic concepts with great vision,” Nixon told the White House staff after his return. Since little was at stake in their conversation, they were able to be, by their own lights, frank. “I like to deal with rightists,” Mao explained. “They say what they really think—not like the leftists, who say one thing and mean another.” (Mao found Kissinger unimpressive: “Just a funny little man. He is shuddering all over with nerves every time he comes to see me.”) But neither was able to put the relationship to use. Nixon resigned in 1974; Mao, already debilitated when Nixon met him, died two years later.

MacMillan’s book is a clearly written, informative, moment-by-moment account of Nixon’s visit, set in the context of twentieth-century Sino-American history. The context makes it plain that both governments had excellent reasons for wishing to establish better relations—that by 1972 the “opening” of China was inevitable. China was a weak country. It was by no means a world power, and it had just been ravaged by one of the paroxysms of self-destruction that possess totalitarian regimes, Mao’s Cultural Revolution. It had nothing to gain by persisting in its self-imposed isolation and much to hope for from a show of cordial relations with the United States. Although the issues of Taiwan and Vietnam were mutually intractable—China refused to put pressure on North Vietnam to end the war, and the United States could not withdraw all its troops from and support for Taiwan as long as the war was in progress—the United States and China had a shared interest. They wanted to make the Soviet Union nervous. The Soviet Union was a military threat on China’s northern border; it was also a patron of the North Vietnamese regime. A demonstration of comity between China and the United States was a means of chilling Soviet designs in Asia.

This is why Nixon and Mao chose fanfare over quiet diplomacy—a dramatic meeting between heads of state rather than discussions among lower-level officials. They didn’t need to reach agreement in their talks; they only needed everyone to see that they were talking. The year before Nixon’s visit, China had been given a seat in the United Nations General Assembly; it had established diplomatic relations with Canada and a number of other countries as well. No one spoke of weeks that changed the world then. The change-the-world rhetoric was Nixon’s, and it was aimed at the Kremlin. Nixon wasn’t talking about trade agreements or cultural exchanges or improved international understanding. He was talking about the balance of power.

Although the Cold War was on American minds, for the Chinese the rapprochement had a different significance. “There is chaos under heaven,” Chou told the Americans at one of the meetings in the Great Hall of the People. He meant that the world was in a turmoil of civil wars and national liberation movements—that regimes were changing and maps were being redrawn everywhere. While Chou and Mao both saw China as the vanguard of these transformations, they understood the transformations not principally in ideological terms, as the triumph of socialism and collectivism over capitalism, but as the crisis and overthrow of European imperialism. The civil strife in China that led to the Communist victory in 1949 was fed by the “century of humiliation” during which China was preyed upon by foreign powers, from Britain to Japan. Isolation was a natural response: China feared foreigners because it had good reasons for fearing foreigners, not because insularity is a feature of the Chinese character. The architect of American Cold War foreign policy, Dean Acheson, understood that the role of the United States in the world after 1945 was largely a result of Great Britain’s decline as an imperial power (though he paid too little attention to its effects in Asia). After Acheson, American officials tended to define the American role in terms of the threat of Communism. Communism was a threat, but it was a threat within a greater upheaval. The Cold War was the context for Nixon’s visit to China; decolonization was the context for the Cold War.

The claim that Communist states were enemies of imperialism was preposterous, of course. The Soviet Union was nothing if not an empire. And not long after Vietnam was united under Communist rule, in 1975, China invaded Kampuchea (the former Cambodia). Tibet, Manchuria, and Mongolia have been fought over continually. Territorial ambition is not exclusive to capitalist hegemons. Every major power wants hegemony within its own sphere. The policy of Nixon and Kissinger was to maintain the balance.

The idea for the visit was Nixon’s. When Kissinger learned of it, in 1969, he thought that the President had lost his mind. But he eventually came to appreciate the geopolitical logic of the move and turned it into a foreign-policy caper worthy of his self-described cowboy persona, making a secret visit (code name: Polo One) to Beijing through Pakistan to meet Chou and test the terrain. Kissinger and Nixon both savored the undercover nature of the business, and even played it up. They kept not only the American Secretary of State, William Rogers, in the dark; they failed to inform their allies, some of whom, particularly Britain and Japan, were angry when they found out. MacMillan says that news of the visit added a new word to the Japanese vocabulary: shokku.

MacMillan’s account of the Chinese side of the story is good at making clear both the reasonableness of Mao and Chou’s position in their discussions with the Americans and the complete moral depravity into which their regime was sunk. It is less good at capturing the special febrility of American social and political life during Nixon’s first term. Her book is not organized to create drama—it begins with Nixon’s conversation with Mao and then fills in the background stories—and some material gets repeated. Her conclusion that “the China card did not produce as much as the Americans hoped for” is accurate but anticlimactic.

Nixon’s difficulties with being in the world were not limited to aspirin bottles. He had a mind-body problem like few other politicians. He was neurotically self-conscious about his affect and his image—he used to scribble reminders to himself to project qualities like coolness, strength, and joy—but the obsession didn’t do him much good. From the beginning, his image was his greatest liability as a politician. It wasn’t that he failed to project coolness, strength, or joy; it was that he was so obviously trying to project them. He came across not as an earnest man thwarted by a recalcitrant physical manner. He came across as a phony. And so, having a keen sense of where his weaknesses lay, he surrounded himself with publicists and ad men. One of these was H. R. Haldeman, the former J. Walter Thompson employee who served as the White House chief of staff until Nixon sacrificed him and his smirking twin John Ehrlichman to the gods of the Watergate hearings (who were not propitiated). Haldeman scripted the China trip down to the last camera angle, and it was, from a public-relations point of view, a success. MacMillan’s chapter on this aspect of the visit is called “Haldeman’s Masterpiece.”

There were a few missteps, of course. These were the Nixons, not Rogers and Astaire. MacMillan explains that Pat Nixon insisted on wearing a red coat for her arrival, although she had been told that in China only prostitutes wear red. Asked for his thoughts after a tour of the Great Wall of China, Nixon replied, “This is a great wall.” Nixon’s gifts to his hosts seem strangely chosen for a trans-Pacific trip: two musk oxen, named Milton and Mathilda, and two large California redwoods. Alexander Haig, who had been on one of the advance visits, warned that when Nixon was toasting (and there was a great deal of toasting) he should never actually drink what was in the glass. Nixon was known to get slurry after one drink, and the Chinese toasting libation, mao-tai, was notoriously high-proof. He seems to have fallen off the wagon at one point, and critical observers felt that he obsequiously over-toasted.

The Chinese stage-managed their part of the show, too. MacMillan describes the scene witnessed by the Nixons during a visit to the Ming Tombs: “children, with touches of rouge on their faces, skipping; families dressed in bright new clothes having picnics and listening to revolutionary songs on their transistor radios; groups of friends playing cards, apparently oblivious to the bitter cold.” After the Nixons and their entourage departed, a Party official with a large bag went around to collect the transistor radios. Nixon and Kissinger both underwent chopsticks training before they left the United States. MacMillan’s surprising report: Nixon became “reasonably adept,” but Kissinger was “hopelessly clumsy.” Advantage Nixon on that one.

The diplomatic product of the Nixon visit to China, known as the Shanghai Communiqué, reads as a reasonably straightforward presentation of the positions, generally opposed, of the two sides. “The text is surprisingly lively for a diplomatic document,” as Nixon put it in his memoirs. MacMillan explains that crafting the text was an ordeal, and that the ones who suffered were Kissinger and Chou and their staffs. Nixon and Mao were presented with drafts and simply signed off on them. Still, when he returned to Washington, Nixon wanted it known that he had been the one responsible for the tone of the communiqué, and he directed Haldeman to inform Kissinger that (in Kissinger’s account) Kissinger “would serve the President better by stressing to the press and above all on television the great personal qualities that made the achievements possible.” Haldeman gave Kissinger a list of ten such qualities. Kissinger was, predictably, disgusted, and he took some revenge in his memoir “White House Years” (1979). “The conviction that Nixon’s standing depended less on his actions than on their presentation was a bane of his Administration,” he wrote. “It caused him to seek to embellish his most incontestable achievements, or to look for insurance in the face of even the most overwhelming probability of success. It was the psychological essence of the Watergate debacle.”

Still, Nixon’s instinct about images was not unsound. In diplomacy, images are weapons. They trigger sentiments and alter minds. One of the treats arranged for the Nixons in China was a gymnastics and table-tennis exhibition. Nixon was fascinated by the show. He recorded his reaction in his diary: “The appearance of both the girls and the men, as well as, of course, up to the superb Ping-Pong event left an impression that was not only lasting, but also foreboding.” Years later, he returned to the experience in his memoir, where he wrote about “the awesome sight of the disciplined but wildly—almost fanatically—enthusiastic audience at the gymnastic exhibition in Peking, confirming my belief that we must cultivate China during the next few decades while it is still learning to develop its national strength and potential. Otherwise we will one day be confronted with the most formidable enemy that has ever existed in the history of the world.” This was undoubtedly a conclusion that Nixon’s hosts hoped he would draw. They wanted more than that, though. In the imagination of the outside world in 1972, China was either a terrifying monolith of world revolution or an insular irrelevance. Mao and Chou wanted to show that they could be taken seriously as statesmen. In Nixon, they found the man to help them, because that’s what Nixon wanted for himself. ♦

Louis Menand has contributed to The New Yorker since 1991, and has been a staff writer since 2001.